M.P. Shiel
Matthew Phipps Shiel (1865-1947), was born July 21, 1865, in Montserrat, West Indies. His father,
a ship-owner, shopkeeper, and lay Methodist preacher had laid claim to the small rocky Leeward island of Redonda, of which
his son was crowned king on his 15th birthday. Beginning to write at 11, Shiel was educated in Barbados, then London,
England. Shiel spoke seven languages and served as an interpreter before trying his hand at medicine and teaching
mathematics. Shiel was an active man, jogging six miles a day into his 70s and practicing mountaineering and
yoga. Married twice, Shiel was "an eager womanizer" fathering several illegitimate children. Impressed at an early
age by the works of Edgar Allen Poe, and given his knowledge of many languages, Shiel's poetic prose was
idiosyncratically unique, being compared by some to improvisational jazz, by others to stylistic sound effects. Shiel
has been accused by some of anti-Semitism, but others suggest he used the racist views of his time as a literary device
to ultimately discredit racism an expound his own peculiar belief system. Towards the end of his life Shiel
adopted an anti-Christian stance based on scientific knowledge over hope ("ignorance") and completed an analysis
and retelling of the Gospel of Matthew. Several of his works toy with eugenics and the Nietzschean übermensch
concept, though the latter under a communal rather than individualistic form, and not as something inherent in a
race or creed, but rather a status achieved through learning. During his life Shiel wrote 25 novels and
numerous short-stories, the best of which he produced between 1895 and 1905. These include
Prince Zaleski (1895), Shapes of Fire (1896), Cold Steel (1899), Contraband of War (1899),
The Purple Cloud (1901) and Lord of the Sea. Shiel died on February 17, 1947, at a hospital in Chichester.

This volume contains in a first part, biographical materials from various sources. Besides Arthur Ransome's narration of a 1906 visit to Shiel's squalid apartment in London, and Malcolm M. Ferguson's "L'Abri" about his visit to Shiel's rural home in 1944 all the biographical information tells one very little about what Shiel was like as a person, and Shiel's own "About Myself" is very sparse in such matters too. Even in Shiel's letters, presented elsewhere, there is a fairly business-like tone, certainly not one of emotion or personal introspection. Portions of his letters home to his family when first in England are presented in some places, but there excerpts serve much more to establish events than emotions. In a nutshell, while some postulate certain events or conditions to have led Shiel's writing where it went, there appears to be no extant information on what made M.P. Shiel, the person, tick.

A second portion of this volume updates the material presented in the original 1948 version to 1979. Here A. Reynolds Morse discusses Shiel's alledged anti-Semitism, his literary sources and the role of the "Overman" in his novels , amongst other subjects. Much more amusing is some 150 pages on Redonda, the small rocky West Indian island Shiel was crowned king of as a teenager (see author blurb). This includes its inclusion in a number of maps, a photolog of a pair of late 1970s expeditions to Redonda by a number of Shiel fans, royal edicts from Shiel's successor King Juan I (John Gawsworth) naming various friends of the author dukes and barons, various articles on the phosphate mining (guano) and flora and fauna of the island -- and even the National Hymn of Redonda. In a final portion, there is a discussion of Shiel's collaboration with adventure writer Louis Tracy on some detective novels, along with an bibliography of Tracy's works. Again, while this isn't quite as dry as Volume 2, this volume is for the real Shiel fan, not for the casual reader.

Georges Dodds is a research scientist in vegetable crop physiology, who for close to 25 years has
read and collected close to 2000 titles of predominantly pre-1950 science-fiction and fantasy, both
in English and French. He writes columns on early imaginative literature for WARP,
the newsletter/fanzine of the
Montreal Science Fiction and Fantasy Association
and maintains a site reflecting his tastes in imaginative literature.